Over the years, Bear’s Den Fly Fishing Company in Taunton, Mass., about forty minutes south of Boston, has earned a reputation for knowing not just the best new gear, but also the value of vintage. It’s a robust shop with an unusually wide range of rod brands: Beulah, Diamondback, Douglas, Echo, G. Loomis, Hardy, Nam, Orvis, Redington, Sage, Scott, St. Croix, TFO, Thomas & Thomas, and Winston…
“I don’t really want to talk you into coming here,” said Capt. Joe Dilschnieder, owner of the Madison River Fishing Company in Ennis, Montana, while chatting a few weeks ago. I’m personally not a huge fan of the Madison River, well, mostly the crowds that come to fish this iconic Montana stream. In fact, when I was an outfitter in Livingston, I judged our fishing by how rarely I was forced to make the drive to the Madison. But even back then, I always enjoyed running into Joe. He makes everyone feel welcome, whether on the river or in his shop. I also found Joe’s path to being a fly shop owner and renowned guide on the Madison to be a compelling tale…trout bum makes good.
In the late 1880s, a stone mason in Fort Collins, Colorado began building a home out of materials he had salvaged from the decommissioned county jail. After its completion in 1889, this structure would go on to house several mayors, serve as a hospital, and enter the national register of historic places before becoming a fly shop. The shop’s founder had a brother who was a Trappist monk so he named the shop after St. Peter, the great fisherman and disciple of Jesus. Since 1992, St. Peter’s Fly Shop has been servicing, outfitting, and educating Colorado’s Front Range.
Evan Bottcher grew up in the Hungry Trout Fly Shop located in the heart of the Adirondacks. The Shop is deep in upstate New York about 90 minutes south of Montreal, Canada. “I would get off the school bus at my dad’s fly shop and hang out until my mom got home,” Evan says. “In those days, it felt like it was full of old timers. It was all anglers older than 50.” Evan, who took over the shop from his father in 2011, explains that in the last decade the younger guides and patrons have given the shop a new, cooler spirit. “The industry has evolved. It is more affordable for people to get into the sport now with less expensive packages, new techniques, and new flies,” explains Evan. “But there is so much knowledge from the old timers that will be lost if it isn’t written down.”
“Are you Lary?” is a question Ebon Robinson, shop manager, gets asked often. He is not, but you can’t blame folks for asking the question. He is standing behind the counter of Lary’s Fly and Supply in Columbia Falls, Montana. And he is a dude.
Amy and John Hazel, owners of Deschutes Angler Fly Shop in Maupin, Oregon, are committed to consistency. “I’ve never had anybody fish a single-handed rod, and we’ve never had anyone nymph fish for steelhead,” says Amy. “It’s always been swinging, it’s always been a floating line, and it’s always been small surface-flies that are no deeper than a couple inches.” For more than twenty-five years the couple has guided the Deschutes the way they wanted to, mainly because they feel it’s the most effective way to target the river’s summer-run steelhead.
In my experience, the best fly shops typically have shop dogs in them. And if the owner is a hockey fan, then that dog will be named Stanley. Such is the case with Littleton, Colorado-based Anglers All fly shop, which owner Chris Keeley, a native North Dakotan, bought in 2009 from Terry and Lori Nicholson.
Spending more time at home lately? Fancy yourself a writer? Could you use $2,500? Then consider entering a submission for the 2020 Robert Traver Fly Fishing Award, sponsored by the John D. Voelker Foundation and the American Museum of Fly Fishing (AMFF). Here is the link to the awards page: https://www.voelkerfoundation.com/traveraward/ and below is the winning submission from 2019—”A Wet World that Burns” by Jimmy Watts (photos by Carson Artac), which first appeared in the summer 2018 issue of The Drake
It’s late February and I stumble out the door to grab another beer kept cold by winter’s free refrigeration. If it was anything but the high-octane variety, it would’ve frozen from a lack of alcohol. I pop the cap, drain it, and unzip my pants, melting as much snow as possible when I piss—anything to…
Thomas & Thomas finds a friend in the whiskey business Like many Westerners, I grew up without ever giving much thought to bamboo fly rods or rye whiskey. These things were viewed—like icy ski slopes or Steelers fans—as products of the Northeast, and thus of little concern to us Left Coasters. In college I started…
Walk into the Bozeman offices of Tom Morgan Rodsmiths and an immaculate bamboo rod greets you. Natural yellow. Maroon wrappings. Agate guides. Fluid action. It’s stunning.
BEFORE APRIL ARCHER cofounded Denver-based SaraBella Fishing—makers of women-specific fly rods—she’d already noticed an influx of female flyfishers to the sport. But as an angler herself, fishing since she was a toddler and flyfishing for the past 16 years, she also recognized that there was a distinct lack of women-specific gear.
Though mountain bikers and flyfishers often overlap in their choice of craft beers and flannelwear, for the most part these two subcultures have adopted a “separate but equal” mantra. Salsa Cycles aims to bridge that gap with their new Blackmorow Fat Bike. In their video, “Touching The Sun,” Hansi Johnson and Mike Reimer load their…
Feelings are part of it. That’s because our cherished fly rods, whether impatient laser throwers or deep-bending noodles, stroke emotions. When they feel right, we’re remarkable anglers. When something’s jacked, it’s a slippery slope from elitist to self-defeatist. Idaho-based Waterworks Lamson, with its new Center Axis Rod/Reel, is banking on recalibrating the way we feel…
Google Maps had led me astray. I had typed in “flyshop” but found myself in a strip mall parking lot. Before I could reroute myself I caught a glimpse of a 1976 Ford Custom Ranger truck covered in trouty spots. Maybe I was in the right place. Sure enough, a hand-painted sign informed me that…
I’m comforted by the similarities between most fly shops. Sure, the rod rack might be in a different corner and each shop will have a couple local patterns, but that same “how ya doin?” coming from behind every counter reminds me of the common flyfishing culture we share across the country. However, every once in awhile…
Anglers All has good energy. Natural light shines from the two-story windows. Railroad Earth and a snoring dog provide the soundtrack. Employees greet customers with a firm handshake and a “What can we do for ya?”
Scoring a paycheck to fish incessantly seems like a savvy career move—if you can find the right mix of employer (preferably a company churning out badass gear) and locale (somewhere near steelhead, or poon flats, smallies ponds, tidal redfish… a carp ditch). Insatiable flyfisher Russell Miller began the process in Boulder, CO, in the late…
A few years ago, I was sitting on the porch of a house I no longer live in, venting to a friend about “too much work, not enough fishing.” I told him I wanted to fish again, and said I knew just the guy to get me back on the water. The porch had great…
“I CALL THESE OUR FEEL-GOOD PROGRAMS,” says Dennis Dunsmoor, Director of Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI), referring to several small-scale businesses he oversees, including rod-building, that are run out of the Arrowhead Correctional Center in Cañon City. “We don’t make money off of them, but the offenders learn skills that will help them on the outside.…
American tinkerers had a lot going on in the late 1800s—blueprinting modern cars, stretching cities skyward, and finding inventive ways to evade severe prohibition laws. Meanwhile, in Milan, Ohio, Thomas Edison flicked the switch so we could see in the dark. And about an hour east, in Akron, Earnest Pflueger—aka the Founding Pflueger—aimed to one-up…
When Winston added a third “I” to its BIIx rods several years back, the classic all-around sedan received an engine upgrade in the form of boosted horsepower. Thanks to a slightly stiffer mid-section and tip, the speedier BIIIx performed great in the wind and was more accurate at longer distances than its predecessor.
With so many manufacturers barking the benefits of increasingly faster actions, veteran rod designer Tim Rajeff of Echo Fly Rods asks “why follow the flock”?
THERE WAS A TIME when skateboarder-turnedgraphics- creator Dave Hartman excelled at the art of being aimless. Bucking the law and generally lacking purpose, Hartman bounced from home to home in suburban Arizona and California, rural Alabama, and southern New Hampshire. Until fishing intervened. He found a fly rod and carried it to Montana. And there…
BEFORE THE EARLY 1990s it was impossible to catch steelhead on a fly rod, and certainly not using a floating line and a single-handed rod. We just couldn’t get our small flies deep enough, we couldn’t cast them far enough, and we all just stood there wishing we had a center pin and roe sacks,…
IT STARTS IN HIGH SUMMER, in Labrador, that land of windswept crags, quaking bogs, and enthusiastic blackflies. “The land God gave to Cain,” as the explorer, Cartier, described it. Well, it is my sincere hope that the sumbitch took along a fly rod. I sure did. I’m on assignment, chasing down a mineral prospector who…
I pulled into the Aspen Recreation Site just before 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 3rd, after a 13-hour, nearly nonstop rental-car bender from Vancouver. The site is the lowest of three B.C. Ministry campgrounds along the Morice River, sitting about eleven miles southwest of Houston—home of the world’s largest fly rod, the world’s largest sawmill,…